I've got an idea for how we could use some of this government open data.

We could … wait for it … use it to map public toilets!

"Is that it?" I hear you cry, and with good reason. Every call for ideas on open data has featured the suggestion that we use it to map toilets.

The problem is that there isn't any government data on where the public toilets are (or when they are open or who they are accessible to). Public toilets are provided at local government level and even then it is on a voluntary basis.

Consequently the data needs to be coaxed out of over 300 councils who may or may not know what open data is, and may or may not see the point in publishing it.

This is why I came up with The Great British Public Toilet Map, an idea for a public participation website that tracks which councils have published public toilet open data, and which have not.

Where the data exists, the map shows the toilet location and information about them. Where data does not exist, the public can contact their councils to ask them to join in with the project.

Faced with requests direct from the public, and seeing that other councils are participating, the councils will hopefully publish the data and we can all use it to make toilet maps containing useful information that is currently fragmented across hundreds of council websites.

Are toilets really that big a deal? What sort of person lobbies a council about toilet data?

I work on a research project called TACT3, funded by New Dynamics of Ageing. We've conducted 100 interviews with people about needing, finding and using public toilets. When a 26-year-old with irritable bowel syndrome says they won't go to new places unless someone checks the toilet provision first, you start to realise that something is wrong. This is affecting people's quality of life.

Many older people have continence concerns and only go to places where they know there is a toilet. Many more suffer from an urgent need to go as a side effect of water tablets prescribed for diabetes or high blood pressure. Consequently if they go out for the day then they don't take the pills. "Tempting providence", as one lady put it.

Self-dehydration is no way to manage your health. However, even knowing the answer to that most common of questions: "where is the toilet?" is only solving half the problem.

For this data to be really useful we need to know more than where the nearest toilet is. We need to know that it is a toilet that meets our needs. Imagine you are unsteady on your feet and the toilet is down a flight of stairs. Imagine that there is a baby-changing unit in the Ladies, but you are a dad. Imagine you're on your way home from the nightshift and the nearest toilet is shut. Imagine the nearest toilet costs 20p and you don't have 20p. You do not need to have a medical condition to be in a situation where you have some pretty serious "continence concerns".

Information about public toilet location, opening times and facilities is information councils have. Sharing this information as open data should not make councils nervous in the same way as that financial data might; it's just useful information that connects a public need to a public service.

The biggest risk that councils face is infringing their Ordnance Survey licensing agreement. Despite OS making huge leaps in opening up its data, many councils still insist that publishing the co-ordinates of public toilets and other points of interest provided by OS is not permitted, ironic considering this 2008 Guardian article highlighting the need for OS to move with the times uses public toilets as its example.

What I really like about The Great British Public Toilet Map is that it is driven by the public. One of the biggest debates in open data is "how do we get people to use the data that we publish?" If we cannot get people to use the data then we cannot get local government to see the point in providing it.

The problem is that we're asking the wrong question. We should be asking "what data do people want?" and through The Great British Public Toilet Map the public are telling us in no uncertain terms.

If I am honest then I also like that we would be asking the local authorities to take responsibility for their public toilet information. The other option would be to cut out the councils and crowd-source the data. This is what most of the existing toilet-finder apps are trying, though there is no frontrunner.

Of course this can work, (as can adding toilet information to OpenStreetMap and using their data), but this requires a huge amount of data being in the system to make it useful to the public as an app, and then worth their time contributing to it.

The apps also need moderators that stop people from listing random pubs as public toilets despite the sign on the door saying "customer use only". Meanwhile the pub receiving a grant from the council under a Community Toilet Scheme is nowhere to be seen.

The other issue is, and correct me if I am wrong, if you've gone to a public toilet and found that it's closed for a month due to building works, you've probably got more pressing things to do than correct the data in your iPhone app.

Would it not be better if the council, who ordered the work and knew about the closure, was updating their open data that your app is using, thus stopping you from being sent to that toilet in the first place?

Council-provided open data could greatly improve all the existing toilet-finding apps and provide the critical mass of data from which to launch an even better service, such as "Trip-Advisor for toilets" as one lady excitedly suggested.

I know I sound terribly idealistic, but then there already is a National Public Toilet Map.

It's for Australia, it is funded by the Department of Health and Ageing and it provides details on 14,000 public toilets provided by more than 1,200 organisations. The information is also provided as open data.

If Australia can publish public toilet open data, then so can we. We just need to ask our councils to provide the data – data that can tell us where we can go, when we "need to go".

Gail Knight was the runner-up in the recent OpenUp awards organised by The Stationery Office (TSO) with her proposal. The judges felt that her idea deserved a wider audience because it has such social value and illustrates key elements about open data: it would improve people's lives, it would free data that is already available, and would create a commercial opportunity for websites or apps that could use it. - Charles Arthur, one of the panel of OpenUp judges.